Printmaker Juan de Dios Mora doesn't really believe the Mayan prophecy that the world will end today, but that hasn't stopped him from using his art to plan how he'd escape.

“Laters,” the 28-year-old San Antonio artist's solo show at the Southwest School of Art, depicts resourceful characters using furniture, vehicles and other stuff they own to make low-tech vehicles to escape the apocalypse.

“I was thinking about the Mayan prophecy, and I saw this movie where rich people buy tickets on a rocket to escape the end of the world. I thought, what would poor people do? How would they escape?” de Dios Mora said.

Further inspiration came from his hometown in rural Mexico, where he'd seen men trick out their bicycles with discarded CDs or use a plastic lawn chair to replace a missing truck seat.

“I'm really obsessed with converted vehicles at the moment,” de Dios Mora said. “I thought it would funny to show a guy escaping an apocalypse on a rocket made from a couch. Also, mueble can mean furniture or vehicle, so it's like a play on words.”

De Dios Mora has a master of fine arts degree in printmaking from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He's had four solo shows and taken part in more than 20 group exhibits. His work has been collected by individuals and institutions, including the University of Hawaii at Hilo.

It's a far cry from his early life weeding fields and selling bread in Mexico. He hopes his journey will serve as an inspiration for others.

“Sometimes I think we feel like we are less,” he said. “We don't trust our concepts and imagination. I want to be a role model. Someone from their community they can identify with. Someone who shows them that with hard work, you can achieve anything.”

De Dios Mora's artworks are deeply symbolic and rich in personal and cultural references. Urban myths, religious iconography, cartoons, folk tales and state symbols are all reference points. It's a surreal, often humorous world where a rocket is powered by hair dryers, a motorcycle morphs into an animal, and a cowboy rides across the sky on a broomstick.

The coyote appears as a reference to the artist.

“The coyote is a smuggler,” de Dios Mora said. “People who bring (immigrants) across the border are sometimes called coyote. I think of myself as someone using humor and art to smuggle my ideas across to the people who view my work.”

De Dios Mora grew up in Acasico in the state of Jalisco. Even then, when he had to work in corn and chile fields, he expressed himself artistically.

“I was supposed to help my parents weeding, but instead I would make all these little figures out of mud,” he said. “I think it shows you can be an artist even if you don't have much.”

When he was a teenager, de Dios Mora's family moved to Laredo. For a while, he “ran wild” before deciding he didn't want to waste his life.

“You don't have to work here,” he said. “You can be a kid. You can get an education. I decided to grab onto it. Put all of myself into my education.”

A well-resourced after-school program kick-started his interest in art. He couldn't believe the drawing paper was free — he was accustomed to buying it for 5 cents a sheet.